Matilda was now over on the other side. "Yes, and think of keeping it up. Folks about here make no bones of telling me that they were both half-witted, only as she's my sister, they try to give me to understand as she caught it from him. He was a miser, you know." Jane was just getting her second leg over. "I don't know a thing about him," she said. "Well, you will, soon enough. The neighbors'll come flocking as soon as I'm gone, and you'll soon know all there is to know about us all. They'll pick me to pieces, too, and tell you I'm starving Susan to death, but I don't care. Climbing these fences has hardened me to calumny." They crossed the strip of cow-pasture, and Matilda got over another fence, saying as she did so: "Whom the Lord loveth He chasteneth," leaving Jane to make the application and follow her at the same time. Then they found themselves in a trim little garden. "How sweet," said the niece. "You can see I've done my duty by it, too," said Matilda; "that's my way. I'm hard and I ain't pretty to look at, but I do my duty, which is more'n most handsome women do. Every last bean here is clawed around like it ought to be, and the whole thing neat as wax. Same with Susan; you'd think from her face I'd murdered her, and yet the Recording Angel knows she's had a cold sponge and every last snarl combed out of her hair every day since I came. I don't boast, but I do work." "Dear me, it's a long way from the house," said Jane, forgetting her higher philosophy for the minute. "It's a good ten minutes to get here. A picking of peas is a half-hour's job. And ten to one, when I get back, the cat's been at the cream." Jane had had time to remember. "I can see you've been awfully good," she said warmly, "and my, but you've worked hard. Everything shows that." Matilda's face flushed with pleasure, the sudden pathetic flushing of unexpected appreciation. "I just have," she declared. "I've worked hard all my life and done a lot of good, and nobody's ever bothered to thank me. She don't. She just lays there and lets me run up and down stairs and climb fences and dig weeds and scamper back and forth with a extra hike, when I hear the bell of the door, till it'll be a mercy if I don't get neophytes all over, and the New Asthma in both legs, _I_ think." After a brief tour of the tiny whole, devoted mainly to instructing the novice, Matilda led the way back to the house. "Does it ever need watering?" Jane asked, lapsing again to a lower level. "Sometimes," said Matilda briefly. Jane hadn't the heart to say another word until--several steps further on--it occurred to her that the garden also could be only a good factor in God's plan, if she wreathed it and shrined it and saw it in her world, as He saw all His world on the day when it was first manifest and set. "And God saw everything that He had made, and behold, it was very good." CHAPTER IV JANE BEGINS SUNSHINING